This is a personal blog updated regularly by Dr. Daniel Reed, Vice President for Research and Economic Development at the University of Iowa.
These musing on the current and future state of technology, scientific research and innovation are my own and don’t necessarily represent the University of Iowa's positions, strategies or opinions.

Current Affairs

August 08, 2011

I spent my childhood in a small town, where the human population (825) was substantially outnumbered by the wildlife. It was a place where time seemed to move slowly and events from the outside world percolated slowly into the local environment and rarely affected us immediately. The single individual who filled the role of reporter, editor, circulation manager, printer and advertizing executive of the local newspaper struggled each week to fill its pages with "news." After all, there were only so many deaths, marriages and births to report.

The slowmoving world of my youth has been eclipsed by instant communication, where news flows across the planet in milliseconds, from farflung sources to a globally distributed audience. It has all been made possible by the explosive growth of inexpensive computing systems, mobile communications, the worldwide fiber network, and the rise of cloud services and social networks. Today, there are few places on the planet where one can be truly incommunicado. (See The World Is Small.)

Although the free flow of information is a wonderous thing, the concomitant decline in social and economic hysteresis now means that single events can have global effects on a frighteningly small timescale. Sometimes this can be humorous (e.g., the latest news on an entertainer's social antics), other times it isnewsworthy (e.g., a world sporting event), and still other times, it is profound (e.g., a social or government revolution).

The rapid, worldwide response to news of economic uncertainty has been both newsworthy and worrisome. It has affected European, U.S. and Asian financial markets, with fear and uncertainty in each driving response in the others. Without doubt, it is an exercise in global crowd psychology and behavorial economics that has implications for individuals, families and their future.

In a world where information traveled by sailing ship or steamship, our economic markets were much less tightly coupled. Consequently, there was time for more reflection and deliberation, even if the global markets may not have been efficient in a market sense. I am not suggesting we return to that past. We cannot, nor would we wish to do so.

Like all complex systems, our global economic and social environment operates on multiple time scales. Some of these are amenable to human reflection, others are increasingly driven by real-time communication. It is important that we remain cognizant of the power and value of timely reflection and discussion and of the personal effects of our market actions. (See Disruptive Innovation: Changing Lives.)

July 26, 2011

This is an exciting time, when the future becomes the present. Who could have imagined access to the world's knowledge base in the palm of your hand, anywhere, any time? Who could have imagined the ability of entrepreneurs to project global business presence without their own IT infrastructure and technical staff?

Such is the power of the cloud. It creates enormous opportunities for businesses – large and small – to create new products and services, operate more nimbly and efficiently, advancing the digital economy and our global leadership. It also creates opportunities for governments to operate more efficiently and offer services and capabilities that were heretofore largely inaccessible. However, like all new technologies, the cloud brings challenges as well.

Today, the TechAmerica Foundation released its cloud computing report. I was privileged to be the commercial co-chair, working with a host of industry and academic leaders drawn from across the spectrum of cloud providers, service and software developers and researchers.

Recommend actions that would ensure the competitiveness of U.S. companies and cloud providers, domestically and internationally.

The report identifies a set of best practices and actions, in response to both charges. These recommendations focus on a diverse set of topics. These include: (a) the need to update U.S. laws (e.g., the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act) to reflect changing technology and legal needs; (b) clearer rules and processes on data breach disclosures to maximize transparency; (c) realization of an identity management ecosystem as envisioned by the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC); (d) sufficient bandwidth and web addresses to enable reliable connectivity to the cloud; and (e) clarity around the rising issues around transnational data flows. (See Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations.) Finally, the report discusses the need for ongoing industry and academic research to advance cloud computing technologies and the cultural issues that often limit the deployment of new technologies.

As William Gibson once noted, the future is here; it is just not evenly distributed. We have the opportunity distribute the future more evenly, making client and cloud services universally available, creating jobs, ensuring American competitiveness and empowering innovation. I believe we can and we will, working together, private and public sector, to ensure U.S. competitiveness and cloud uptake. I encourage you to read the report, offer comments and engage in the ongoing dialog on the rich and rapidly evolving world of client and cloud services.

Finally, on a personal note, I am especially indebted to my colleague, Elizabeth Grossman, who worked long hours under stringent time constraints to help complete this report.

July 11, 2011

Over the years I have had the privilege and the good fortune to count the powerful, the rich, the learned and the famous – Presidents, billionaires and Nobel Laureates – among my colleagues and acquaintances. Some found themselves successful via fortunate circumstances, some were extraordinarily hardworking, and some were extremely gifted. Each affected me in a different way.

Yet none of them has ever impressed me as much as two exceptional people whose names you've never heard. That's no surprise. Their words never filled the newspaper headlines, their actions never graced the history books, nor did their work dominate the scientific literature. Nevertheless, they are my true saints and heroes – my grandparents.

Like millions of others, they were the unhonored, the unsung backbone of America. Indeed, people like them are the backbone of civilization. They taught me almost everything that matters about character, about honor and respect, and about love. Their names were Lora Estella McHenry and Sidney Harrison Frazier, and they were married one hundred years ago this week. This is a bit of their story, though it does not begin to do them justice.

Going Courting

Sidney was born in 1889 on the wrong side of the tracks – about ten miles by wagon from the tracks, in fact, in South Fork, Arkansas. (That's about ten miles from Mammoth Spring, where I grew up.) With a third grade education, he could read and write, but not well. Truth be told, just about everyone in the clay hills of northern Arkansas was lacking in education and dirt poor; it was all just a matter of degree.

Lora was born in 1891 in Pleasanton, Kansas, and her family moved to Arkansas when she was a girl. It was a bad economic choice. Her mother (my great grandmother) cried when she learned the cabin had no windows. Nevertheless, the family managed to preserve some semblance of the education and niceties they once knew.

Mostly Scottish-Irish descendents of settlers, both families lived hardscrabble lives, trying to eke out a living by the sweat of their brow. They were sharecroppers and some landowners, but everyone struggled. In later years, Sidney often talked of working from "can to cain't" (first light until too dark to see) for two bits a day, six days a week. That didn't leave much time for socializing, for Sunday was the day of rest and religion.

Every Saturday night, Sidney would walk five miles to the "musical" – fiddle and banjo and square dancing – then he'd walk home again. There, he fell in love with Lora, and looking at her photograph, it's easy for me to see why. She was a better woman than he deserved, and he knew it, but that didn't stop him from trying.

How are you? This leaves me all okay. You may meet with briter (sic) faces and with boys you think more true, but remember little darling, no one loves you as I do.

SHF

Hello, Sidney

How are you? I am all right, am going this evening to take another music lesson. I had an invitation to a party last night but did not go.

Lora McHenry

Think of me when far away.

Think of me when near.

Think of whose love for you is lasting and sincere.

It's a testament to that love that they both saved the cards, and there are many, for over seventy years. Today, they are among my most prized possessions.

Tough Times

Lora raised six children (seven if you count my grandfather, Sidney) through two World Wars and the Great Depression. He was a good time Charlie, always looking for a get rich scheme, none of which ever worked. He bid to carry the U.S. mail into the country and won, because nobody in their right mind would bid so low. He'd then drive along the route with a .22 across his lap, shooting squirrels for supper. He also sold Rawleigh products out of the back of his car, often selling alcohol-laced lemon extract by the case to old women who couldn't get moonshine.

It's a wonder they never starved, and they would have if it weren't for her. Through it all, she was the rock, the one absolute, on which the entire family depended.

Her daughters worshiped her, and her grandchildren adored her. Her sons would have beaten any man half to death who wronged her, and not a soul in town would have questioned the righteousness of such an act. My mother was the last the six, born a decade after the others, and I was her only child. (That's my mother in the middle between my grandparents in the photograph above.) That made me the youngest grandchild, the joy of their old age.

The last years of their lives together, my grandparents lived in a little three room house my grandfather and my grandmother's brother (my great uncle Jesse) built with their own hands. There was a barn and chicken coop, and a garden, always a garden. My parents and I lived diagonally across from them, and I could toddle and later walk down to see them. (The man I described in The Power of Plum Jelly lived just across the dirt road, and the vignette I related in A Taste of Sherbert took place just after this.)

Remembering My Grandparents

There are so many memories from those times: my grandfather sending me home staggering drunk (at age five) after he gave me a hot toddy to "cure" my cold; fetching a live chicken for Sunday dinner and fried chicken – unless you've seen a chicken with its head cut off, you will never truly understand the colloquialism; eating watermelon on the back porch and spitting the seeds into the backyard; marveling at the hole my grandfather shot in the living room linoleum while cleaning his gun; sitting between my grandparents in the '48 Ford pickup truck; and my grandmother working, always working, in the garden and in her beloved flower beds.

I cannot recall my grandmother ever owning more than three dresses, all handmade on her own sewing machine. Most of the time, she made them from the cloth from flour sacks. (She also made me a sheriff's vest, complete with white star, for me to be a wild west cowboy!) Two of the dresses were for every day, and the third was for Sunday church.

At home, she always wore an apron, not just to protect her dress, but as a basket to fill and carry with garden produce. Her knees were bad after years of work, so she'd stoop rather than squat to work in the garden. She'd fill it with green beans, tomatoes, okra, cucumbers and corn, then sit on the back porch to work, breaking beans, making dill pickles, slicing okra and cutting corn. After fifty years of use, her paring knife was worn and curved from the number of times my grandfather had sharpened it on the whetstone.

Then there were the "musicals." The little house would be filled to overflowing with family and friends, the windows thrown open, with people standing on the porch and in the yard. Between my grandfather's fiddle playing and the five string banjo, the story telling and the laughter, I would watch my grandmother fixing ice water and soft drinks in the kitchen. I saw a beautific smile on her face, and I knew she was happy.

Farewell Lora

I was seven years old when she died, felled by a second heart attack while making a pan of cornbread for my grandfather. It was fitting in a way, for she died as she lived, always working.

My mother fetched me from school that day and told me grandma was gone. When we got to the little house on the corner, I sat down on the rolling footstool he and she had made from an old wooden box. He'd put legs and rollers on it, and she had uphostered it in green and white vinyl.

I sat there looking up at him and saw something extraordinary, something that is burned into my memory to this day. My grandfather, this story telling, fun loving man, looked down at me with big sad eyes. It was then that I saw the dried tears on the inside of his bifocals, and I knew life would never be the same again.

The funeral was on a cold Sunday afternoon, and the small town church was packed, filled with more flowers and more people than I'd ever seen before, both ones I knew and ones who rarely darkened any church door. In the years to follow, I watched many a small town preacher struggle to say something good and uplifting about some of the less beloved of their congregations, but in her case, the preacher never hesitated. He talked about all the good things she had done, her love of family and how much she had sacrificed.

With a seven year old's theological certainty, I knew she was in heaven, and the preacher did too. The only question in his mind and mine was whether the rest of us were good enough to get there with her. With the bar set this high, the preacher and I both had some serious doubts, and he took some time to remind us that we'd best be walking the straight and narrow or it would be warm, powerful warm, in the hereafter.

Saint, it's not a word I use lightly, but she surely was in all the practical senses that really matter. It's not just the gauzy memory of age, but a word I saw in action every day of my young life, and one hundreds of people used unbidden when they talked about her. She asked for nothing, and gave all she could in return. Everyone wanted to be better around her.

Sidney's Lessons

My grandfather lived almost twenty years after my grandmother died. We spent many a day together, him too old for anyone to take seriously and me too young. He'd regale me with stories about people and places, many of them gone before I was born.

There was the Devil's Backbone, a hill so steep one had to back a Model T up it because the gravity feed could not keep the engine running driving forward. There on the Myatt was the place where my father was born. There was the old Kinchelow place, which burned down in '08.

Often, we'd go fishing, using crawdads, worms and even corn as bait, fishing for bream, sunfish and trout. (To this day, I cannot order étouffée without hearing my grandfather's voice saying, "Boy, that is bait, not dinner.") We fished the Myatt, English Creek, Warm Fork, and Spring River, and sometimes we'ed even catch fish, though that wasn't the purpose, and neither of us cared if we came home with a filled stringer or not.

Sitting deep in the country on the riverbank of places he'd known as a boy, my grandfather would talk and I would listen as he told tales of 80-plus years of living, the good times and the bad. He gave me bad advice about how to meet girls and good advice about marriage. (He was a small town Justice of the Peace after all, and he'd learned that if you'd been drinking since sundown Saturday night and getting married seemed like a good idea at 2 am Sunday morning – it really wasn't.)

As the years went by, our roles slowly and subtlely shifted. I spent more time driving and doing, but always, I listened. Years later, when I was a young man and he was almost gone, I reminded him of the day my grandmother died, and the tears I'd seen on his glasses. I asked him what he'd been thinking. He simply said, "I haven't been happy a single day in my life since then. There's never been anyone else like her." Then he started to cry. He didn't need to say anything else.

Looking back on it now, I also understand why my grandmother stoically endured so much hardship. My grandfather made her laugh, and for all his faults, he loved her with a deep and abiding passion. That was enough for her.

Reflections

Lora and Sidney; they lived in a world now gone. Yet that which was precious remains. They had a love that lasted, one that has crossed and touched generations.

I can still close my eyes and feel the gentle touch on my face as my grandmother kissed me and called me her "little sweet meat." I can hear my grandfather tell a story and punctuate it with an uproarious, "I laughed till I cried."

Make no mistake; there are saints and heroes among us. In my case, their names were Lora and Sidney. Yes, the Ph.D. is worth something, but this is what really matters.

July 05, 2011

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACMblog.

There's an old joke, "Q: What do you call someone who speaks only one language? A: An American." Certainly, being monolingual limits and constrains one's exposure to and understanding of the cultural and linguistic diversity that is our global human heritage. Alas, I fear the same is is true in far too many domains where cross-cultural fertilization would inform and enlighten all parties.

I will spare you a meandering discourse on the theory of language origins, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the Indo-European language tree. Nor will I digress to discuss the intellectual divide that separates the sciences from the arts, for C. P. Snow has written far more elequently about that than I can. (See Food for Thought for some still useful summer reading suggestions on culture and intellectual pursuits.) Rather, I want to focus on a far more constrained and practical intellectual concern, the cultural gap separating technologists and policy experts.

Divergent Ontology

Over the years, I have learned that being bilingual in matters of science and technology and in matters of strategy and policy is far rarer than I might have first hypothesized. Those of us with PhDs, ScDs or research MDs speak a particular argot largely incomprehensible to the general public and even to the learned and sophisticated in other domains. Similarly, those who live in the legislative and poliy world depend on a venacular that seems obscure and obtuse to those in technical domains.

The technical and policy communities lack shared cultural referents, created all too often by endemic pressure to differentiate. In consequence, the communities are often estranged, lacking an ontology of discourse to address their common problems and exploit their complementary skills. The power of consilience has long been known, as the tale of the Tower of Babel makes clear.

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

Today, we have our own Babel of misperceptions and miscommunications at the intersection of technology and technical policy. (For a few thoughts on consilience in a technological world, see Consilience: The Path To Innovation.)

There are, of course, other telltale signs. If you own more than one tee-shirt covered with Maxwell's equations (and you can explain them) and a statistically significant fraction of your wardrobe is festooned with technical conference logos, then you are definitely on the geek side. Conversely, if you own a closet full of suits, perhaps some bespoke, and you choose the suit, matching tie, shoes and fountain pen, based on your mood, those you expect to meet and the venue, then you are likely a policy wonk.

I exaggerate, of course, on both counts, to illustrate a point, though elements of the humorous stereotypes are real. I resonate with both caricatures for my closet is filled with both conference tee-shirts and with a variety of suits. But, -- and this is important -- I do not wear them at the same time.

Bridging the Divide

How do we cross the intellectual divide, providing technical advice to policy experts in ways that they find useful and actionable? Equally importantly, how do we translate policy constraints – political, economic and social – into contexts intelligible and actionable by technical experts?

The key in both cases is to respect the differences and value each bring, and place one's self in the other's situation. If you are a technical expert, this often means finding intuitive analogies that capture the key elements of the technical idea. For example, I recently explained the potential economic advantage of cloud computing by saying that it brought some of the efficiencies to organizational IT that big box retailers brought to consumer goods.

Had I explained the design of a cloud data center, the networking and content distribution network, and the infrastructure optimizations, I would have bewildered my audience. I simply wanted them to understand that familiar economic forces were driving the cloud transition and raise awareness of the policy implications. Any new technology can both create new jobs and spur economic development and disrupt an industry, creating unemployment, which then strains the educational and social safety net.

Likewise, if you are a policy expert or a technical person facile in policy, you must explain the constraints and practicalities of government actions and budgets to your technical partners. As a technologist, one must respect those realities rather than disparage them. The policy world is a complex, dynamic system with deep and unexpected consequences from almost any major change.

It is a critical fallacy to believe that if a legislator or staff member had access to the same facts as a scientist or technologist, then he or she would draw the same conclusions about policy implications as the technologist. Policy discussions may begin with data gathering, but their outcomes are based on values, priorities and tradeoffs. Any government's agenda must be balanced against a myriad of social and political constraints, including education, social welfare and national defense. Often this means finding ways to compromise and achieve part of one's goal. Ten percent of the objective can be victory and should be celebrated as such. There is often time to seek the next ten percent at a future engagement.

Moving Forward: Technical Policy Ambassadors

For those of us in science and technology, I believe we must encourage more of our colleagues to become bilingual. An increasing fraction of our world is shaped by technology, and it is incumbent on us to facilitate the discussion of technology, social welfare, economic development, environmental policy, security and privacy, health care and medicine, defense and protection, and innovation and discovery. If we are respectful of political constraints, we can help policymakers understand the pace of technological change and its possibilities and recognize that even a national legislative body cannot overturn the laws of physics.

Only by being ambassadors to both our technical colleagues and our policy partners can we constructively shape our future. We must find and expand those shared cultural referents, creating an ontology of technical policy discourse, and we must reward our colleagues for such engagements.

Remember, it's okay to wear the conference tee-shirt and the suit, just not at the same time.

June 27, 2011

I have been spending quite a bit of time on approaches to address the spectrum crisis – the seemingly insatiable demand for more wireless communication as the number of Internet-connected devices continues to grow. We are working with a consortium in the UK to host a major white spaces trial. Details can be found on the Microsoft blog, along with a video explaining the challenges and opportunities.

May 16, 2011

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACMblog.

Our notions of privacy and security are deeply tied to our social and historical notions of person and place. The aphorism, "A man's home is his castle," captures that notion and its roots in English common law. This Castle Doctrine followed settlers to the colonies and was later codified in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Your family heirlooms may be secure in your personal castle, but what of the information about you that lives on the Internet? The legacy of physical place and norms around it are far less relevant.

Equally importantly, we often convolve privacy and security without considering their differences. One needs security to protect private information, but one can have security without privacy, as many world events have shown. Security is a topic for another day; let's talk about the evolving notions of electronic information privacy.

Riding the Light

That picture of you at a family reunion, squinting into the sun, can rarely be delimited by a physical location. It might be on disk two, machine nine, rack twenty three in a North Carolina data center, but it probably will not be for long.

Instead, information flows freely, in radio waves among our wireless devices and on photon beams along the fiber optic cables that connect the burgeoning network of worldwide cloud data centers, each themselves larger than the entire Internet was just a few years ago. It's cached, distributed, forwarded, copied, mirrored and indexed.

All of which suggests that we need to rethink our notions of information privacy, moving beyond concepts rooted primarily in person and place, and considering logical privacy. These issues are complex and emotionally charged, for they challenge many of our social, cultural, legal and economic assumptions. I would not presume to offer a definitive answer here. Instead, let me offer three ideas to stimulate our debate the future of information and electronic persona management in this brave new world.

A Simple Family Photo

Let's return to that family reunion photograph, captured on a smartphone and posted to a social network site. What might I, as person in the picture, wish to specify and who else might be involved?

First, I might well like to specify a bounded lifetime for the photograph, after which it would be inaccessible to anyone. Of course, the bound might be infinity, allowing it to remain in the electronic ether forever. That is the current default, as more than one person has learned to their chagrin. I have occasionally noted, tongue in cheek, that one can trace the history of my hair loss on the Internet due to just this default. (For the record, let it be noted that I am at peace with my baldness.)

Second, I might choose to define the transitivity of access. I could share the photograph with my extended family but not allow any of them to share it with their friends. Or, I might limit access to some overlapping circle of personal or professional friends, preventing viral propagation. This is challenging because our overlapping spheres of social, professional and familial influence rarely have hard boundaries, as anyone who has configured their social network privacy settings knows all too well.

The usability of specification interfaces for privacy and security deserves far more attention than it has received. All too often, the only options presented are a broad and vague end user license agreement (EULA) that one must accept to use a service or a byzantine set of confusing service configuration options whose effects are less than obvious. Privacy specifications must be made far simpler and more intuitive.

Third, I might wish to define a claims-based access policy. This is not a binary access specification, but rather a statement that this person or this entity can access this photograph for this and only this purpose. Thus, I might grant my cousin the right to look at this photograph but not to sell it, alter it or combine it with other media.

Ownership, privacy, reputation and decision making are intertwined in subtle ways. What if I posed for a reunion photograph but one of my crazy cousins was dancing on the table behind me? Who controls that family reunion photograph, me, the drunken dancer in the background, the photographer with the smartphone, all of us? The shifting nature of social relationships further exacerbates these challenges.

Let Us Reason Together

Let me end with another aphorism, "Possession is nine tenths of the law." In a digital world where images, video and text can proliferate globally in seconds, we need to rethink what "possession" means.

March 20, 2011

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACMblog.

The human suffering caused by the recent earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor damage in Japan have saddened us all. As we watch the ongoing struggle to cope with the complexities of a multifactor crisis, we can offer technical and logistics assistance where appropriate, extend emotional and social support to our friends and colleagues, and draw insights, as we always do, for possible responses to future disasters. Each such challenge reminds us that the interplay among complex, dynamical systems is subtle and deep, and that chaos, not just in its popular definition, but in its deep mathematical sense, is ever present, lurking in the shadows, aided by its old friend entropy.

As I have read the international newspapers, watched the television reports, listened to the radio interviews and scanned the web sites, I have been struck by the challenges each news organization has faced in explaining technical concepts in intuitive and readily accessible terms. Whether it be explaining logarithmic earthquake scales (e.g., the Richter scale), where a unitary delta corresponds to an order of magnitude difference in magnitude; radioactivity and half-lives, where exponential decay reduces the quantity of material; or the subtleties of dose equivalent radiation exposure measurements, Sieverts and food life cycles, successful explanations depend on both the knowledge of the reporters and of the audiences.

All too often, I have heard inaccurate descriptions of scientific processes or hyperbolic assessments of risks, neither grounded in facts or statistics. To be sure, explaining complex concepts is not easy. This is, perhaps, a teachable moment, where we can highlight the importance of scientific and engineering literacy across all of society, not just among a cadre of technical experts.

Scientific Literacy

Regardless of what we might hope, no engineering structure, whether a nuclear reactor, tsunami sea wall, or earthquake resilient building can be perfectly safe, fully effective or absolutely resistant. Nor can all possible outcomes be anticipated in a natural disaster. One can only plan and assess, then execute accordingly, drawing on the best practices and knowledge currently available, and then learning valuable lessons from each failure.

Our society depends deeply on scientific and engineering advances – including those in computing – for they are embedded in our communication systems, manufacturing processes and supply chains, food production and processing, logistics and transportation, energy production and environmental interactions, and economic mechanisms. Societal understanding of scientific processes and terminology, as well a shared appreciation for the engineering design balances among costs, functionality and risks are essential to informed debate and decision making.

In turn, that understanding rests on our continued investment and support for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education, from advanced technical degrees to general awareness of science and engineering principles among all our citizens. We must continue to make STEM and computing exciting and accessible, for we live in a technological society, with all its incumbent implications.

Meanwhile, I continue to wish my friends and colleagues in Japan the very best. Their struggle is our struggle.

February 28, 2011

I have posted a few thoughts on the coming Internet of Things and the implications for cognitive communication over on the Microsoft on the Issues blog. As I have written in other pieces, I believe we have to rethink how we manage spectrum allocation and adopt much more nimble and flexible policies that leverage the emerging capabilities of cognitive radio. (See Spectrum Future Shock.)

Everywhere, anytime communication is a notable result of recent computing advances, but it's dependent upon available bandwidth, and that bandwidth is finite. Spectrum is, in many ways, like a natural resource that has to be managed judiciously, especially if we are to continue to advance the digital economy and leverage technology to drive innovation—to create new services, new business models, new ways of communicating and living for the betterment of society.

February 24, 2011

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACMblog.

Many years ago, Fred Brooks relayed a tale about how he chose the first application target domain for his computer graphics research. It was not long after he had left IBM and completed his work on the IBM System/360. He had just moved to Chapel Hill and taken a faculty position at the University of North Carolina.

As Fred tells the story, with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, he went to see one of the senior university administrators. He told the administrator that as a computer scientist, he was in the intelligence amplification business. Who on the campus, Fred wanted to know, might most benefit from having their intelligence amplified?

I have recalled this story many times, always with a smile, as I have reflected on the nature of computing and its power.

Amplification and Universality

Computing systems share many features with other instruments and machines, in amplifying human abilities. However, one aspect distinguishes them – namely, their general utility as an intellectual amplifier. Like a universal Turing machine, which can simulate any other Turing machine with arbitrary inputs, computing is broadly – dare I say universally – applicable to human intellectual endeavors, much as all the variants of the inclined plane and lever are applicable to human physical endeavors.

The English scientist Sir Humphrey Davy could well have been speaking about computing when he said, two centuries ago:

Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument. The native intellectual powers of men in different times are not so much the causes of the different success of their labors, as the peculiar nature of the means and artificial resources in their possession.

In a phrase – success accrues to the talented with access to the most effective and powerful tools.

Supercomputing and its applications to science and engineering have been canonical examples of this universal benefit. Powerful new telescopes advance astronomy, but not materials science. Powerful new particle accelerators advance high-energy physics, but not genetics. In contrast, supercomputing advances all of science and engineering because all disciplines benefit from high-resolution model predictions and theoretical validations.

As exciting as those opportunities remain, new ones are emerging in the world of big data.

Big Data: Structured and Unstructured

The tsunami of structured scientific data, produced by a new generation of sensors, and the growth of semi-structured and unstructured data from business, entertainment, social networks and popular culture have created new needs for creative application of our intellectual amplifier. As the recent performance of IBM's Watson system on the game show Jeopardy! Illustrated, the combination of large-scale data, rich algorithm suites and powerful computing is opening new vistas. Vannevar Bush's 1940s vision of a Memex, a device capable of storing, indexing and retrieving data from a broad knowledge base, is now within our reach.

It really is about how we use computing as an intellectual amplifier, allowing humans to be more productive and more creative by doing what we do best – asking interesting questions, ones that span multiple disciplines and that illuminate opportunities at their interstices – aided by power analytic and computation engines.

As one would expect, the panel's discussion topics ranged widely, from the coming exhaustion of IPv4 Internet addresses and the transition to IPv6 through the government enablers and inhibitors for nimble technical and economic responses to the importance of privacy and security in the Internet world. I took the opportunity to emphasize a few points I have made in the past, about the effects of technological future shock and the need for new frameworks and mechanisms for informed debate and nimble decision making.

All of this made me reflect on the dizzying rate of change and the sometimes devestating effects on individual lives.

One Life

My grandfather, Sydney, who was born in rural Arkansas in 1889, experienced the effects of radical change first hand. Armed with a third grade education, he came of age in a time and place where horseback and buggy were the primary transport modes, Sears and Roebuck mailorder was the source of exotic materials (if they could be afforded), a union suit was winter attire, and people quite literally lived off the land.

In that environment, he courted and wed Lora, the love of his life, and he raised six children in often difficult circumstances. It was a hardscrabble existence, one he never forgot. As a young boy, I distinctly remember him describing working in the fields from "can to can't" (i.e. from first light until too dark to see) for two bits ($0.25) per day. He also talked about misery of the Great Depression and the welcome benefits of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), both of which employed his sons.

In a single lifetime, my grandfather saw the rise of the automobile, the deployment of the telephone, the birth of the airplane and the growth of commercial air travel (both propellor and jet aircraft), the appearance of television broadcasting, satellite launches and spaceflight and the dawn of the PC era. He also saw two world wars, experienced Prohibition, suffered through the Great Depression, and watched the urbanization of American life.

21st Century Disruption

We live in a time of economic disruption not seen in most of our lifetimes, while also experiencing the ever more rapid proliferation of new technologies. It's a time when an entire industry can blossom and then die a handful of years.

In such a world of exponential technological change, with its concomitant social and economic disruptions, it is all too easy for the intelligentsia and technorati topontificate glibly on macroeconomic trends, demographic shifts and global talent flows while speaking sotto voce, if at all, about the human cost of technological future shock. I confess that I have been guilty at times myself.

For the well prepared and positioned, rapid technological change does create amazing opportunities. For many less fortunate, it can be a rather less happy tale of fear and uncertainty, of economic dislocation and opportunity lost. Such is our challenge, fostering rapid innovation in a globally competitive world while also supporting and aiding those struggling with the transition.

Disruption is not just a tale of gleaming new technologies and economic niches; it also has a personal face, something we should all remember. Each time I forget, Sydney and Lora gently remind me.